Authors: Michael Rios & Emma Kim

During the current debate over Texas districts some analysts and legislators have commented that Black and especially Hispanic voters are now shifting Republican and this was a basis for drawing new safe-Republican districts with sizable minority populations. However, federal law prohibits purposefully drawing large populations of Black and Hispanic voters into districts in which their preferred candidate loses. This is referred to as vote dilution. Prudent map drawers determine the candidates of choice for various racial and ethnic groups to ensure their map does not result in vote dilution. To assess whether or not minority and White voters in Texas have the same, or different, “candidates of choice,” we used the latest Texas map shapefiles for Plan C2333 to examine the newly configured districts and how Whites and Minorities voted in recent elections.

We relied on the same methodology – Ecological Inference – that Federal courts require in VRA litigation to assess minority voting patterns, and we downloaded shapefiles, election results, and racial characteristics directly from the Texas Legislative Council (TLC) website. Our analysis focuses on two of the “new” Republican districts created in the latest map in Dallas (CD 9) and San Antonio (CD 35) which previously elected Democrats. Across both of these districts we find strong, statistical evidence that Hispanic and Black voters continue to side with Democrats as their candidates of choice while Whites vote in the opposite direction for Republicans. The result is that large numbers of Black and Hispanic voters are being placed in new districts in which their preferred candidate cannot win and their votes are being diluted.

In the tables below, we report the results of King’s EI and EI RxC, two regression models that use official election results and Census CVAP racial data to predict voting patterns. The statistical models show that whether we analyze Whites versus non-Whites, or whether we detail estimates for Blacks and Hispanics, the results are the same: minority voters in Texas, especially in Dallas and San Antonio, are unified in support of Democratic candidates.